Emily Dickinson

Virtually unpublished in her lifetime and unknown at her death in 1886, Emily Dickinson stands today in the front rank of American poets. Though she lived as a recluse in her father's house in Amherst, Massachusetts, her imagination knew no bounds, ranging with utter fearlessness through a vast landscape of love, immortality, nature, joy, faith, and despair. After Dickinson's death, her sister Vinnie was stunned to discover a locked box containing over nine hundred poems - an extraordinary body of work which the poet considered her "letter to the world." This edition gathers a rich harvest of the finest of these poems, carefully selected by the staff of The New York Public Library. Arranged chronologically, they chart the development of a poetic sensibility fired by immediacy of perception and a magnificent grasp of language. Emily Dickinson and her world are further evoked here with rare manuscripts and prints drawn from the Library's special collections, including a selection of the poet's handwritten letters.

An illustrated collection of poems by the famous nineteenth-century poet.

From the book:The verses of Emily Dickinson belong emphatically to what Emerson long since called "the Poetry of the Portfolio," - something produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer's own mind. Such verse must inevitably forfeit whatever advantage lies in the discipline of public criticism and the enforced conformity to accepted ways. On the other hand, it may often gain something through the habit of freedom and the unconventional utterance of daring thoughts. In the case of the present author, there was absolutely no choice in the matter; she must write thus, or not at all. A recluse by temperament and habit, literally spending years without setting her foot beyond the doorstep, and many more years during which her walks were strictly limited to her father's grounds, she habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends; and it was with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime, three or four poems. Yet she wrote verses in great abundance; and though brought curiously indifferent to all conventional rules, had yet a rigorous literary standard of her own, and often altered a word many times to suit an ear which had its own tenacious fastidiousness.

In selecting these poems for commentary the author chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson's work as a poet, from her first person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath. Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, this selection reveals Emily Dickinson's development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called the history and science of feeling. In accompanying commentaries the author offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes. All of Dickinson's preoccupations, death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought, are explored here in detail, but the author always takes care to emphasize the poet's startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, the author reveals Dickinson as a master of a revolutionary verse language of immediacy and power. Here, the author turns her skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. She serves as a guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative feature of the poems.

"The first full-color facsimile publication of Emily Dickinson's manuscripts, [presenting] this important, experimental work exactly as Dickinson wrote it. These fifty-two envelope writings offer a never before possible glimpse into the process of one of our most important poets"--Dust jacket back.